The heat in Brisbane. It was like being sat on. Insects chittered like electricity.
Emerging at the top of the gangplank, Margery blinked. A sun such as she had not imagined pulsed down from the sky. Everywhere she looked people were meeting friends, shouting, waving, hurling suitcases, pointing which way to go. Gladstone bag in one hand, suitcase in the other, she was shoved along in a crowd of thousands toward the Health and Immigration Hall. Points of light shot from the water and burned her eyes. Her head hammered inside her helmet. A woman behind shouted down her ear that they’d be lucky to get out alive.
Margery was held for hours in a loud sea of boiling hot, smelly people—swatting flies and doing her best not to touch anyone—until finally a medical officer called her forward. “G’day!” he boomed. He examined her fingernails for the ridging that might be a side effect of TB. He asked her to roll up her sleeves, and inspected her arms, like meat on a stall, and before she could object, he shone a flashlight to her eye, his mouth so close they could have kissed. But when it came to her passport and tickets, the customs officer stared at the photograph, as if it were the world’s most complicated puzzle.
Panic tightened her throat. She told him about the woman who had charged into the booth at the passport office in London when she was trying to have her photo taken. She explained that her tickets showed a berth for two people, but her assistant had already left. Her assistant had been an extremely unreliable person. A liar, you could say. She had been lying right from the start. So it didn’t matter, she said. She was more than capable of managing by herself. She had done so all her life. When her aunts died, she’d inherited their flat, and also a maid, but then the maid had become ill so she wasn’t really a maid….
The words kept spewing out. Even to herself, Margery sounded ridiculous.
The passport official held up both hands, unable to take any more. “Whoa,” he said. “Welcome to Australia, Miss Benson. I hope things get better for you, ma’am, I really do. It’s a big country. You’re bound to make a new friend.” Then—before she could explain any more about her situation—he asked the next person to step forward.
The Marine Hotel was an ugly yellow establishment, close to the port. However, it took a long bus journey to get there and Margery couldn’t open her window. Everything looked alien and too colorful—the trees were all wrong, and the flowers didn’t make sense. Not even the sky seemed right. There didn’t seem to be enough room in her head to accommodate so much that was different, and it hurt her eyes to keep looking. Worse, the bus was packed with happy people who insisted on cheering every time they passed a sign welcoming them to Queensland. At the hotel, a friendly young woman sang, “G’day, Margery!” as if she actually knew her, and offered to ring for the porter, but Margery—still smarting from Enid’s rejection and determined to prove not only to herself but also to the southern hemisphere that she could manage without help of any kind—insisted on dragging her things to a room on the second floor. Sweat poured from every part of her. Her hip felt jackknifed. She could only hope that wherever Enid had ended up, it was not very nice.
There had been times at sea when Margery would have given anything to be in a silent room with proper windows and a bed, none of them shifting up and down. But now that she was in one, she could hardly bear to close the door. She told herself she didn’t need Enid Pretty. “I don’t need you,” she said aloud, and since that didn’t make her feel better, she said it more fiercely: “I can find another assistant.” But the quiet seemed to spread into every corner of the room and swallowed it whole.
Margery unpacked her toothbrush and soap, and all she could think of were Enid’s multiple pots and jars. For dinner she ate a steak the size of her head, and no one talked so long she felt an urge to snap things in half. The waitress asked if she was in Brisbane for a holiday and instead of being interrupted by Enid—who would have twittered away not just about the gold beetle, but the waitress’s lovely hair, and then whether or not she had children, and did she have any photographs, and oh my goodness weren’t they lovely—Margery said, “No,” and the waitress took her empty plate and moved on. In bed, she opened her guide to New Caledonia and a scrap of paper floated free: “GoOb luck, Marge! Finb the deetle!” Outside, the trees gave a soft sound, like a whispered conversation that had nothing to do with her, while a thousand insects briefly switched to mute. It was like the silence before an air raid.
That night Margery dreamed she was carrying a red valise packed with her collecting equipment, but she couldn’t manage to secure the lid, and bits of her equipment kept falling out and getting lost. In the end, all she’d had left was a useless pink hat. She turned over and went back to sleep and had the same dream yet again. At that point she gave up. She lay in the strange bed, in the strange room on the other side of the world, feeling so lost and unknown, she could barely move, while outside the insects buzzed, then paused, then buzzed again, as if following an invisible conductor. She couldn’t stop thinking of the pink hat.
Enid was far from perfect. And yet it was suddenly clear to Margery, as clear as the light already sharpening at her window, that without Enid’s help, she would never be able to find her father’s beetle. And while Brisbane was big, it wasn’t big enough to hide Enid Pretty: to do that would take a small continent. She had a whole day before the flying boat. Margery would find her.
“No,” people said. “Sorry, ma’am. Never met that woman.”
Margery described her, over and over. Yellow hair; strong to the point of physical violence; talks a mile to the minute. No one had seen her. The hotel porter asked if she had tried the motel. The motel receptionist sent her to a boardinghouse for women. As the temperature rose, Margery trudged from one street to the next. The sky burned down, glaring and white-hot in the streets, and her helmet was worse than an iron on top of her head. She tried cafés, milk bars, shops where women in afternoon frocks of blue and cerise bought whole joints of meat without whipping out a ration book. She had traveled through Suez, she had seen leaping fish and the green flash at dusk, she had heard about camels and watermelons and palm trees, and now here she was, alone on the other side of the world, looking for a woman with the yellowest hair—and she seemed to have vanished. Somehow, she had believed that her simple will to find Enid would be enough to invoke her spontaneous appearance. Then a man asked if she had tried the old American army camp out by Wacol that was now a holding place for migrants.
It was already midafternoon. Margery took a bus through dusty outer suburbs until the suburbs ran out, and all she could see was dust. By now she was a pool of sweat on her plastic seat; she was actually sliding up and down. She sat with her face toward the window. The great sweeps of space and the hard elemental colors almost blinded her. She still couldn’t believe that trees were not the green things she knew at home, but these spindles with rags for leaves. Finally, the bus reached the gates of an army camp, surrounded with high coils of barbed-wire fencing and a hand-painted sign: WACOL EAST DEPENDANTS HOLDING CAMP FOR DISPLACED PERSONS.
The camp stretched for miles, a bleached town of Nissen huts with corrugated roofs, like great big tin cans sliced in half and set on their sides, the heat sizzling over them. She was stopped by a guard at the gate, wanting to see her paperwork, but when she asked after Enid Pretty, he consulted his record book and found no mention of her. It was only as a last resort that she tried Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, just arrived. He checked again. Yes, they were there. He pointed the way—keep on the main road until the fourth intersection. Take a left. Take a right.
Margery limped from one road to the next, from one pinch of shade to another. The air smelled of stew and reminded her of how hungry she was. She turned her eyes from peach and nectarine trees in pink bloom, and orange and lemon trees with proper fruit, to old petrol cans and broken bits of machinery and lines of washing that hung motionless in the heat. In one road, people were hosing their huts to cool them down. In another, they sat on front steps, fanning themselves and incapable of moving. She had no idea why she had come.
Then she saw a figure ahead of her. That figure was Enid.
Distance is an illusion. We stand apart so that we may know each other better: Margery had been away from Enid for a day and a half, and now she barely recognized her. If it weren’t for the yellow hair and the clack of her pom-pom sandals, Margery would have marched straight past. Enid moved like an old woman. She was also being followed by several mangy dogs—another telltale sign—though she didn’t seem to realize that. She seemed only half awake.
When Margery had imagined this moment, she hadn’t banked on it hurting. She had assumed, too, that she would know what to do, but she didn’t. She stopped, waiting for Enid to turn and make the discovery for herself, but Enid trudged on, slow as slow. Then she took a left—still followed by dogs—until she reached a hut and paused. She cast a frightened look over her shoulder, and slipped inside.
Margery waited. So did the dogs. They all waited. The sun got hotter. She sat a bit. Walked up and down a bit. Briefly a shadow moved on the opposite side of the road, then disappeared. Panting like heavy machinery, the dogs crawled off in search of shade. By now Margery felt parboiled. Stay there much longer, she would either pass out or spontaneously self-combust. She had no choice but to knock politely at the door of Enid’s hut. The door turned out to be a canvas flap, her tap turned into a push, and without so much as a “Good afternoon,” she crashed straight through.
If she had known it was a party, she would have brushed her hair. She would also have checked her boots.
“Christ, what’s that terrible stink?” was all she got by way of greeting. A hundred lights seemed to shine on Margery. So there she was, standing in the middle of a Nissen hut that was lined with hardboard and hot as an oven, with a number of temporary beds inside it, while ten people gawped back at her. None of them were wearing pith helmets. None of them were dressed in purple frocks. And the terrible stink was Margery. A mix of her own sweat and the lump of dog business that she knew, without needing to lift her foot, was attached to the sole of her boot. Spotting her, Enid’s jaw dropped.
“Marge?”
“Who’s this, then?” said one of her new friends.
All Margery could see was Enid’s face. Despite the makeup, it looked flat and empty. She said, “I need to speak to you in private, Enid.”
Taylor pushed his way forward, and stood between them. “Whatever you need to say to her, you can say to me.” He was sweating hard. It was even dripping from the end of his nose. He punched one hand over and over again into the cup of the other, his knuckles meeting his palm with a wet slap. It occurred to Margery that she didn’t just dislike the man, she loathed him. Then a woman at the back laughed and asked if Margery had spotted any lions recently.
She said, “Beg pardon?” A stupid thing to say. She never usually said “Beg pardon?” but borrowing one of Enid’s phrases was like holding on to a handrail.
“Marge, what are you doing here?” said Enid.
“Didn’t you hear? She’s looking for lions,” piped up the unpleasant woman from the back.
Margery had no choice. She had to say her private word to the whole room. “Enid, I owe you an apology. I behaved badly. I let you down. But I’ll never find the beetle if you don’t come with me.”
“Beetle?” laughed the unpleasant woman. “You lost your beetle now, lady?”
“That’s right,” said Taylor, laughing. “This crackpot thinks she’s looking for a gold beetle.”
Nothing she had suffered so far was as terrible to Margery as the laughter that met her now. She was one smelly, moist, furious lump of shame, and she had no one to blame but herself. Enid was the only one who didn’t laugh. Her head hung low.
“You’d better leave, Miss Benson,” said Taylor. “Walk her to the gate, Enid. And mind you come straight back.”
Enid stepped forward and opened the canvas door. A slice of hot white light filled the room. “Come on, Marge. This is no place for a lady like you.”
Outside, she picked up a shard of glass and scraped the dog mess from Margery’s boot. Margery waited, balanced on one leg, helpless. Now that they were alone, she was sure Enid would say she had changed her mind, but she didn’t, she just kept cleaning the boot and talking in a fast way about all the lovely people she’d met at the camp. It was late afternoon, and the sun still showed no interest in setting. There was one baby cloud in the sky that looked lost up there. Abandoned.
“Well, thank you for coming!” said Enid as they began to walk, sounding less like a woman in a migrant camp and more like a hostess at a cocktail party.
“Enid, I know I’m ridiculous. I do know that.”
A huge bird flew past and settled in a spindly tree, bouncing up and down on the branches.
“I can’t come with you to New Caledonia, Marge. I already told you that on the boat.”
Now would have been the moment for Margery to open up, but there was no way of telling her story that would make it acceptable. Besides, she had been raised in a house of women whose skill at not saying a difficult thing verged on professional. The truth had become such an elusive entity, she could as easily talk about her feelings as ride a mule. So she said beetles had two pairs of wings. She knew it wasn’t good but it was the best she could come up with.
“They have one set called elytra and they’re like a shield on top of the second set. When the beetle needs to fly, the first pair splits and lifts, and then the second set—they’re very thin, like film—unfolds. Nothing can fold as tightly as a beetle’s wings.”
“You’re so clever, Marge.”
“A beetle can’t fly with one set of wings. It needs both. It needs the hard set to look after the complicated ones. Butterflies have it easy.”
Enid gave a big sigh that didn’t seem to produce any words. Then she said, “Look, I’m sorry. You have to get a new assistant.”
“You’ve traveled to the other side of the world just to stop here?” Margery pointed at the Nissen huts and the baking hot road. Another dog limped past, covered with sores.
But Enid wouldn’t listen. She had it all worked out. Taylor could put a roof over her head. He was just waiting for his paperwork. Then they’d leave the camp.
“So this is your life? It’s like holing up with Bill Sikes.”
“Who, Marge?”
“A man in a book, Enid. Not a very nice one.”
They passed a group of women on chairs, with their frocks over their knees and their feet in a huge shared trough of water. The women were laughing about something, and when they saw Enid, they waved and called, “What a scorcher, Enid!” and she waved back. She said this was her friend Marge from the Natural History Museum. The women called, “Hello, Marge from the Natural History Museum!” They trudged on.
“Enid,” said Margery. “About that—”
But Enid interrupted. “You want to know how I got on the boat at Tilbury? I stuffed some cash down my bra. That’s how.”
Despite the heat, Margery had to stop again. She didn’t know which was worse: that Enid had done such a thing, or that it was an acceptable alternative to owning a British passport. “Why?” she said. “Why?”
“Because I’m not the kind of woman you need. You’ll only get in more trouble if I come with you. Forget me, Marge. Start again.”
They were almost at the gates. The high fencing was ahead. Ripping a page out of her notebook, Margery wrote the address of the airport. “The flying boat leaves at eight tomorrow morning but you have to get there early for the weigh-in. I think you’ll be fine with all your suitcases—you’re small and the limit is two hundred twenty-one pounds—though, to be honest, you could lose the fur coat.”
Enid took the piece of paper and stared, as if she was seriously thinking about changing her mind. Then she said, “I should go back. Taylor doesn’t like it when I wander off.”
“And what about your husband?”
This time, when Enid looked at Margery, her face was raked and twisted. “It’s too late, Marge. Anyway, Taylor has a gun. He’s not the kind of man you leave.”
Here came that heavy feeling again, as if Margery were being filled with sludge. They went the rest of the way without another word. The gun had put their conversation into a whole new place. Nothing she could think of was big enough to bring Enid back. At the gates they shook hands, like polite strangers. Then Margery opened her handbag and passed her a packet of traveler’s checks.
“Here,” she said. “Take this.”
“You already paid me, Marge.”
“Enid, please don’t be a woman without your own means. Take the money.”
Enid tried to object again, but Margery was already on her way to the gate. It was only once she was on the other side of the fence that she heard Enid shout her name.
“Marge! Thank you! I can’t believe you came to look for me! No one else ever did that! Good luck! Find the beetle!”
Enid clung to the wire, continuing to laugh and blow kisses. Sick at heart, and far too hot, Margery trudged away and did not look back. She had come all this way to ask Enid to help her, when she should have been doing the opposite: she should have been rescuing Enid. Yes, she had given her cash. But she sensed that wasn’t really the point; that, under the circumstances, much more was required. She remembered Enid on the morning of her miscarriage, how Margery had taken one look at her and run. She got the feeling she was always looking at life through a glass wall, but one that had bobbles in it and cracks, so that she could never fully see what was on the other side, and even when she did, it was too late. Then she thought of the group of women with their feet in the big trough and how easily they had sat together, as if they had no secrets. It occurred to Margery that something inside her was hurting, and the thing that was hurting was the knowledge that she would never be that kind of woman. She would always be on the outside.
The bus appeared, throwing up dust, and she clambered on. The driver wished her a happy day and Margery didn’t thank him, she just paid for her ticket and found a seat. Enid had come into her life only to disturb it, and now that she had gone it felt not only smaller, and empty, but shabby, too. She pushed at the window but, again, couldn’t open it, so she sat there, getting hot.
Her loneliness felt closer than her hands and feet.